[
bob
]
01:43, Monday, 14 October 2002
As you might know, I've recently been working on a workflow/process engine known as werkflow. Some folks want to use it for large-scale business processes, some think it could drive UIs, and others think it might make a suitable EAI component.
I personally come from a resource planninng and scheduling background, of sorts. Workflow involves a lot of resource planning and scheduling but potentially on a different scale than I am used to. So, this is a call to all the readers out there...
I'm currently thinking that the workflow itself handles the planning aspects of activities to be performed. So, mostly it's a resource scheduling problem. Resource scheduling is NP-hard, but there are a ton of different heuristics that can be used. With werkflow
, I'll at least have a pluggable scheduling framework, to allow for specialized scheduling algorithms. But, I'd really also like a general-purpose, tending towards real-time, scheduling engine to ship by default.
When dealing with longer scheduling horizons and activity execution times, we are afforded more time for complex scheduling. It's the short time horizon case that I'm unfamiliar with. Anyone out there have a favorite real-time algorithm? Ideally, it'd introduce very low overhead in a mostly contention-free environment. I'm thinking along the lines of werkflow being use to drive your typical web-app, where you have almost enough database connections, etc. Once we start scheduling trucks for cross-country hauls, I'm back on familiar ground.
So, anyone with any useful ideas or algorithm names I should plug into CiteSeer?
(Sorry folks, but I find problems like this infinitely more interesting that the RSS-Dialect-Of-The-Day or My-MVC-Framework-Is-Better-Than-Yours topics...)
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